The first night out was enough fun that we had a second. And then a third. We usually ended up standing still in the middle of a crowded dance floor, wearing absurdly high heels and ridiculously short skirts, and yelling over the music about things like what kind of porn we actually watched and how we got caught masturbating as kids. One Halloween, a holiday we both hate, we tried really hard to go out and Be Fun and we ended up spending the whole night in the bar bathroom, drunkenly complimenting every woman who came in. After a few months of going out together and terrorizing the city of Los Angeles with our drunken antics, we decided due to work schedules that it would be easier for us to meet up at my apartment after work every Friday and get ready (and drunk) before going out. This also ostensibly saved us money on drinks once we got to the bar, as we were both… less than wealthy.
Those Friday nights became some of the favorite nights of my life, not to be incredibly dramatic. We would start planning a week or two in advance, trying to settle on a “vibe” for the evening. (I’m so sorry about using the word vibe. I started doing so ironically, but now I’m doing it for real.) We’d scour Pinterest and Instagram for inspiration. Target and secondhand stores for outfits. Our houses for props. If we were going out at 10 p.m.—everything in Los Angeles closes at 2 a.m.; you have to get out there early—we would start the night at five or six to make time for drinks, hair curling, outfit changes, a meltdown about false eyelashes, and then at least an hour of photos. We are no longer casual about getting ready and taking photos. We have a ring light we’ve named Louise to illuminate us. We purchase disposable cameras to get a different look for our pictures. All of this is ridiculous, we are well aware, and yet we are having the most fun.
Kelsey and I have a firm and beautiful policy of telling each other the truth. If you feel like something is wrong with your appearance (and all of us feel like that a lot of the time), in this space you can simply ask, “What should I change? I feel like I look like a big cheese stick with legs.” Or “Help me!!!!! I look like a news anchor in Cincinnati right now! What do I do?” And the other person will give gentle but incredibly specific feedback like, “I think your eye shadow is too much” or “That lipstick is way too bright with that outfit. You look like a lawn flamingo.” Not that looking like a lawn flamingo is bad, but time and place.
Getting ready to go out beats the actual event (almost) every time. Where else can you scream-laugh, “My vagina is going to come OUT tonight, I swear to God!”? Where else are you going to have someone brush down your flyaway hairs for you with hairspray and a mascara wand? Where else are you going to find someone who will lie down on the ground to get the best camera angle? Where else can you be so loudly yourself, so gaudy, so conspicuous, so wanton? Getting ready to go out is all about the promise of what’s to come—even if the main attraction can never hold a candle to the pregame. It says: The night has just begun and look how much fun you’re already having.
* * *
I never really got ready with people before Kelsey. I didn’t wear makeup until college, I didn’t know how to do my hair until even later. The extent of my preparing to go somewhere until I was about eighteen was me shaving my legs. The problem was that I felt like nothing was actually made for me. I mean, you can put on mascara, but it doesn’t make you not a fat kid. And so instead of trying to do smaller things that might help me look better, I was angry at the entire process, and therefore not a very inviting person to have around at an event centered on beauty. But also, I think having a fat person around during events about clothing often makes people uncomfortable. None of my other friends were wearing Spanx to the homecoming dance. Additionally, by the end of high school, most of my friends had actual dates for dances, dates who would pick them up and take them out to dinner before we all met up for pictures, so we weren’t getting ready together.
At some point growing up, I had been told wearing makeup was for adults; I stringently followed that vague guideline that my parents had probably said when I was five so that I didn’t eat lipstick or something. It’s not like my parents were actively stopping me from wearing makeup, but they also weren’t supporting me wearing it, either. No one was teaching me how to look better, even if my mom offered to help me get ready for big events. I just didn’t know shit and I felt left out and overwhelmed by it. It felt like drinking or sex in a way: things I was desperate to hold myself above and yet things I wanted to partake in with equal desire.
Perhaps because I was an outsider, in my younger mind, getting ready together was about being empty and vapid; it was a time of gossip and vanity. (Which was a really wild thing for me to look down on, since I happen to dearly love vapidity, gossip, and vanity.)
For so many reasons, until I was in my twenties, I hadn’t ever experienced the ecstasy of simply pregaming with female friends. I had made myself so left out in high school, mostly because of my belief that other people didn’t want a fat person around them while getting ready, but really because I was uncomfortable. I eschewed the company of women in college, a time when I very easily could have enjoyed getting ready to go out. I held myself both apart from and above beauty products. Until I moved in with two female roommates at age twenty-two, I simply didn’t know the bliss of having a space where you talk about things like thongs sticking too far up your ass or how your drink got spiked two years ago and you’re really worried about it happening again.
Slowly, as I stopped looking down on the process and actually opened up, the women in my life introduced me to all the things I hadn’t let myself be involved in before. Kelsey taught me how to contour, my little sister Olivia helped me get the right foundation,IV my older sister Lena taught me how to curl my hair with a curling iron before her rehearsal dinner (“You’re twenty-six. How do you not know this?”), and Jordyn always let me borrow her tops. Little by little, women around me helped me figure out how to do all the stuff I had never felt allowed to, that I had been too embarrassed or too righteous to ask about before. Eventually the nights at my apartment with Kelsey turned into nights with Kelsey and scores of other people, who arrived when they could, brought bottles of wine, taught each other contour tricks. Friends of mine from high school and college joined in. My younger sister started coming along. Anytime someone came in from out of town, we folded them into our liturgy.
I know now that there is nothing close to the euphoria of getting a couple of friends together in a room with only two mirrors, blasting early aughts music, drinking champagne and energy drinks, and borrowing each other’s eyeliner, even though I think that’s supposed to make you go blind or something. The vibe—and again, I do apologize for using the word vibe—is extreme friendship and support. It’s safety and joy and making sure everyone is having fun and feeling good (tipsy). There’s no one to impress, no one to cater or defer to. The male gaze is absent. We’re here solely to please ourselves.
* * *
This is ritual and ritual is vital. Rituals are normally for facing uncertainty or danger, for creating safety and security. We stay in small groups at bars we know, we don’t talk to anyone, we watch our drinks, we don’t get too drunk (or if we do, only one of us is that drunk at a time). The risk is relatively low—by careful design. The most dangerous part of the evening is probably the Lyft ride there and back. But the ritual of getting ready eases the more general, existential anxiety of being a woman in a public space. Similar to how the ritual of a bar or bat mitzvah addresses the unknown of adulthood, or that a wedding addresses the unknown of marriage, getting ready to go out protects against the unknown of going out, of socializing as a woman in public.
I wish I had found the joy of getting ready in middle or high school. I wish I’d felt comfortable enough among friends to let them help me with my social anxieties via flat irons and setting powder. I wish I had made friends who could teach me the soap-eyebrow trick and how to put hair spray on the bottom of my new heels so I didn’t slide all over the place. There is little else so rejuvenating as going into a room wit
h your friends and asking embarrassing questions and complaining about people at work whom you hate and showing photos of the new guy your brother is dating and building each other up and labeling what the vibe is for the evening (e.g., “the vibe tonight is goth cowgirl slut”) and talking each other down from a freak-out when fake eyelashes aren’t working and then—when you’ve taken as many photos as you can possibly take and AirDropped the good ones to each other—going out into the world a little tipsy and as vulnerable as ever. Together.
Adventures at a Lesser Marriott
There are some moments in life where you’re just inexplicably lucky. You take the cookies out of the oven at the right time even though you forgot to set a timer. You avoid getting a ticket even though you were parked on the wrong side of the road for street cleaning. You don’t get pregnant even though the condom broke. You made it home before you shit your pants. Life hands you these tiny moments trying to make up for things like seasonal allergies and capitalism. One of my shining moments, where the heavens opened up and fortune smiled upon me, was being invited to beta-test a then-new dating app called Bumble.
Bumble, at the time I joined, was available only to college students on a few campuses. I already had Tinder at the time, like most people who were horny and technologically literate, although I had never actually met up with anyone. Tinder in college was about as useful to me as the Stocks app, which is to say not at all. College tindering is not like real-adult-life tindering where you actually hope to meet people. College tindering, at least for me, involved getting a little drunk with a few friends and passing your phone around so other people could swipe for you. This was especially funI if the person whose phone you were holding was interested in people of your gender, so you could see what you were “up against.”
Bumble came out during my senior year. I’d already finished college a semester early, so technically I don’t think I was supposed to get access to the test app. But no one knows anything, so the engineers over at Bumble (or whoever is in charge) gave me an account that was chockablock full of filthy-hot men. I mean, just disrespectfully attractive options, like if you were trying to cast people for a spring-break trip on a CW show.
If you’ve never used Bumble, (or if your daughter lent you this book and you’re trying to “connect” with her and you haven’t understood what half of the shit I’ve said so far means): Bumble is a dating app where, if a man and a woman trying to be part of a hetero couple both match with each other, the woman must be the one to send the first message. If she doesn’t message first within twenty-four hours, the match disappears and if he doesn’t respond to her missive within twenty-four hours, the match also disappears.II
The concept is very branded Feminism: if we simply have women message first, this will cut down on the harassment and unsolicited dick pics, which, okay sure. Bumble’s whole thing is trying to keep their app positive and healthy or some shit. Which is a nice mission, I suppose, for an app where you’re trying to find someone to rail you.
Unlike Tinder at the time, which had been around for a few years and which had been flooded with blurry photos of guys next to expensive cars they weren’t even allowed inside of, brand-new Bumble was drowning in hot men who were somehow taking high-quality photos, most likely for their LinkedIns, but who cares?
I do not believe straight cis men have any idea just how far high-quality photos will take them on a dating app. Straight cis guys are addicted to using photos that look like the album cover to Blonde on Blonde. Please, straight cis men, I beg you, pay your friend with the most followers on Instagram two hundred dollars and ask them to help you do a natural, candid photo shoot with good lighting in a bunch of different outfits. Maybe even pay one or two more friends to come to a biergarten or something with you and pretend to be hanging out. Yes, two hundred dollars seems like a lot, but when you’re getting laid every day of the week and twice on Sunday, you’re gonna be like, “Okay, Sophia’s right.” Which is what I want straight cis men to get out of this book. Straight cis men have somehow gotten the idea that having high-quality photographs of themselves is—like yogurt and recycling—feminine and therefore beneath them, God only knows why.
Anyway, because Bumble was new, and I was freshly out of college and therefore suffering from a dearth of dick,III I spent a lot of time swiping.
And when I wasn’t swiping, I was messaging. On Tinder, no one really messaged anyone—or no one really messaged me—which is fair. Is it even worth it to meet up with a stranger? Like not just on the I-could-be-murdered front but on the I-could-do-so-many-things-on-a-Thursday-night-that-aren’t-talking-to-a-stranger-about-how-they-grew-up-in-Albuquerque front. But on Bumble, with the twenty-four-hour Jeopardy!-style countdown clock, people got down to the business of actually talking to one another.
Of all the things I offered on dating apps, my photos were not the main event. To be clear, while I spent a lot of time curating them and filtering them and making them as good as possible, I just knew that, firstly, my photos didn’t stack up with the photos of other hot singles in the area, and secondly, my real strength was messaging. The strategy for my own personal dick-hunting operation was to get people to like the pictures just enough to match with me, and then I’d send them fun opening messages like, “How many movies with nuns in them have you seen?” or “What’s the best Sheryl Crow song?” The key was to make the questions zippy enough that someone could answer them while catching up on Better Call Saul or whatever show hot people were watching in 2015. I was good at messaging men. (I still am; I do it for friends all the time.) You have to be a straight-up 8+ to message someone and just say, “Hi.” I was realistic about what I was working with, and I was good at flirty-but-also-slightly-teasing messaging. It didn’t work on everyone, of course. A lot of people were turned off by my brashness; many stopped responding—perhaps because they died, which is what you simply must assume when someone stops talking to you on a dating app. Many never answered my prompts to begin with. Many didn’t even match with me at all to get to the point of being turned off by my quirky salvos. If you add up all the people you’ve met in the past five years, that’s still probably a lower number of people than the number of people who encountered my Bumble profile and were like, “No thank you to whatever that was.” But hooking up with people from a dating app, unlike dating someone or actually falling in love, often resembles a numbers game.
On top of the sheer number of good potential matches Bumble was laying at my feet, the thing I had going for me in that moment was some absolutely newfound… confidence. I don’t think confidence is the correct word, and I know I’m the writer of this book, so I’m the one who’s supposed to be coming up with the correct word. My bad; sometimes writing is tough. What I had wasn’t necessarily assuredness that what I was offering to others was good; it’s not like I deeply loved myself and everything I was about. It’s more that I didn’t care so much if other people weren’t into me. I was running out of energy for talking to men and getting feedback—real or imagined—that they didn’t like me. For the first time in my life, the idea that I could be okay if someone didn’t like me—if a man didn’t like me to boot—was starting to form in the back of my mind.
It was not some fully formed feminist praxis that was leading me to not put all my self-esteem eggs in the what-men-think basket. It was more that I had used up all my energy caring about male opinions when I lived in a house with seven guys the year prior and I had kind of hit rock bottom in terms of mental health, so at that point I was in “Fuck it” mode. I actually could not muster the energy to keep caring what men thought of me.
Another part of my newfound lack of care was that I’d gotten so much shit from men online that I had reached another plane of existence and that plane was “If you fucking speak to me, I’ll murder you.” I was so done. So, so, so done with every cruel, condescending, or creepy thing a man had ever said to me, and so in a way, I was free. I knew that a lot of men didn’t like me. I knew a lot of men
thought—and told me—that I was a fat, ugly piece of shit. And I knew it wouldn’t kill me to be rejected by them. You know how when you go into a job interview that you don’t care about getting and you nail it? I had that energy.
That didn’t make me less horny or desperate to hook up with guys. It’s not like I’d fixed all the broken parts of myself and magically stopped equating any of my self-worth with how hot men found me. I’m not there even now, so let’s not get crazy. Plus, I was newly able to actually go out to bars, and I finally lived with female roommates who wanted to do pretty much the same things I wanted to do every Friday and Saturday night, namely get drunk, try to find a bar to dance in to music that we’d actually heard before, and try to get laaaaiiid. My point is that being horny was still central to my being, and there was an app for that (Bumble). And I now had what could be perceived as confidence, but which was really exhaustion. Thus began what came to be known as Cocktober.
Cocktober commenced when I matched with a guy named Brandon or Braden or something like that who was in town from Ohio on a business trip. There is almost nothing better a man can be than “in town from Ohio on a business trip.” Braden/on/yn and I both knew what we were dealing with, which is about as good as casual sex can get. He told me that he was being put up in a nice hotel downtown. The Marriott by LA Live, if you’re familiar with Los Angeles. Apparently, I’m a sucker for a nice hotel, not that I’d ever really been to one before. Somehow, although I was absolutely wrong about this, I felt—and still feel—like nothing bad could happen to me in a hotel. Like if you murder me in your hotel room, you’re going to get caught. Not that it matters if they find my killer; I’m already dead. Also, the search for my killer reminds me, if you’re a member of my family,IV please stop reading and skip to the next chapter, or better yet, the acknowledgments.
Well, This Is Exhausting Page 16